Right around now, Blair Irvin Jr. was expecting the call from the Florida Tuskers of the United Football League inviting him to training camp.

A star athlete at Patterson High School, Irvin was recruited in 2002 as a cornerback by LSU but ended up signing to play baseball with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. After four years in the minor leagues, Irvin decided to return to football, playing two years with Coffeyville Community College in Kansas and a year with Kansas State before returning to Patterson a few months ago to prepare for what he hoped would be a call to go pro.

"I'm pretty much not going to get that call," said Irvin, 27, speaking in the low mumble that is the best he can do since the early morning of Aug 15. That's when Irvin, who is African-American, said he was lured to a bar in nearby Berwick by a white woman of his acquaintance, jumped and beaten amid a hail of racial invective, leaving his jaw broken in two places and the woman, her half-brother and a friend of theirs charged with second-degree battery and hate crimes.

Denise Aucoin, 30, of Bayou Vista; her half-brother, Robert Taylor, 26, of Jackson, Mich.; and Bengie LaFleur, 29, of Patterson are being held in three different lock-ups in St. Mary Parish, where they are likely to remain at least until they are assigned lawyers and face their arraignment, now scheduled for Sept. 28. Bond is set at $150,000.

Irvin, who was born at Charity Hospital in New Orleans and grew up in Marrero before moving to Patterson in the seventh grade, said he believes the attack was premeditated and racially motivated.

But it will be up to the district attorney's office whether to stick with the hate crimes charges, and some friends and family of the accused say some racist words in the heat of battle don't necessarily mean it was a hate crime.

"I'm hoping they realize that this was just a fight that has gotten out of hand and gone really bad; I'm just hoping that they realize that this was not a hate crime," said Vincent Aucoin, Denise Aucoin's father. "They did not attack this man because he was black."

He said Irvin "was a friend of my daughter's. He had been at her house many a time ... and now, because in the middle of an argument in a fight, someone uses this word, and the law's going to call it a hate crime?"

Lemina Fabre, who is like a second mother to LaFleur -- her home is his legal address -- said she is even more puzzled"They called it a hate crime, but he's (LaFleur) mixed, too -- his grandfather's black," Fabre said of LaFleur, who has told her and others that he was trying to break up the fight.

A judgment call

James Richard, the police chief in Berwick, a mostly white town of 4,500 just across the Atchafalaya River from Morgan City, acknowledged it was a judgment call whether to invoke the state's hate crimes statute.

"It's kind of a tough case to show that they specifically beat him just because he was black, but that was what we charged them with," Richard said.

As events in Jena proved a few years back, a story of race in a small Louisiana town can rivet and roil the nation.

When Rev. Aubrey Wallace of Marrero heard about Irvin's beating from the young man's uncle, Kendel Irvin, at his barber and beauty shop, A Cut Above in Marrero, Wallace alerted the NAACP, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

But Irvin's father, Blair Irvin Sr. -- who lives in Opelika, Ala., since being displaced from Avondale by Hurricane Katrina -- says he does not think that is the way to go.

"I love my son. I want him to come through feeling as if justice has been served," he said. But he said he wants no part of a race drama.

"He don't need no Al Sharpton or none of that," Irvin Sr. said. "I know it's hard for him but I told him, 'We just got to pray and move on and let the law run its course.'"

Blair Irvin Jr. said he met Aucoin in July. He had visited her home in Bayou Vista, but she had warned him, "her brothers and cousins didn't agree with black and white" relationships.

It was 1:30 in the morning on Sunday, Aug. 15, when Irvin said Aucoin called from Charlene's Roadhouse in Berwick.

"She said she was intoxicated and she needed a ride," he said.Irvin arrived to find Aucoin in a bar filled with white people, including her brother, who had returned from Michigan a few weeks before looking for work. Irvin asked Aucoin why she needed him to give her ride. She didn't answer, and while Irvin said he was puzzled, he stayed to shoot some pool.

After shooting two games, Irvin told Aucoin he was leaving, "but when I walked outside to leave, the whole bar came behind me."

"This guy Bengie comes up to me, shakes my hand and he says, 'Hey, are you Blair Irvin?' I said, 'Yeah,' and he said, 'Do you know me?' and I said, 'No,' and he said, 'Well you are about to get to know me cause I'm going to beat your tail.'"

Irvin said he thinks a few other people joined in the beating, but LaFleur, Taylor and Aucoin, who police say struck him with a motorcycle helmet, were the only ones he could identify.

A different version

Stephanie Sanders, a friend of LaFleur's who was there that night and made a statement to police, offers a different version of events.

She said only Aucoin and Taylor were involved in the attack, that LaFleur tried to pull Taylor off, and that only about five people watched. The other witnesses, she said, have made themselves scarce.

"Everyone's drinking, nobody wants to get in trouble, nobody wanted to deal with the police," she said.

The story she heard, said Sanders, is that the fight was ignited by Aucoin confronting Irvin at the bar about a purse with $400 in it that had gone missing the week before. Irvin said he never took her purse, and only heard about that version of events after the fact.

Irvin, who escaped from the scene in his car, said the attack remains what it was the night it happened: a racist hate crime.

Up until mid-August, Irvin had a plan. He would prove himself with the Tuskers, and in a year or two fulfill his promise and be playing in the NFL.

But now, with his broken jaw?

"His football days are over," said his father. "I hate what happened to him."

But, he said, "I'm just happy that he's not dead. I'm just grateful my boy's still alive. I want everybody to stay alive when all is said and done."